LENORE MANDERSON is a distinguished professor of public health and medical anthropology in the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. From 2014 to 2019 she was also a distinguished visiting professor at Brown University in the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. The Society for Applied Anthropology recognized Manderson's career achievements with the 2023 Bronislaw Malinowski Award. She is the author of Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries, and the Social Self, among other books; her most recent coedited work is Viral Loads: Anthropologies of Urgency in the Time of Covid-19. Born in Australia, she now divides her time between Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, and Johannesburg, South Africa.

FORREST GANDER, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in Northern California. Gander's book Be With was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Among his other recent titles are the novel The Trace and two translations: Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda and It Must Be a Misunderstanding: Poems by Coral Bracho.